Saturday 3 December 2011 19.07 EST
First published on Saturday 3 December 2011 19.07 EST

Homelessness charities have welcomed extra government funding to bring empty homes back into use, but warn that the move is "only a small part of what is needed" to solve the shortage of new homes and reduce rough sleeping.

Last week, the government announced a £50m fund to help councils take over and recommission some of the 930,000 homes believed to be empty. The fund is targeted at areas where the collapse of housing-market renewal schemes has led to large numbers of empty homes. A separate £100m programme of empty-homes grants will pay towards the costs of getting privately owned empty homes back into use, with the properties then let at an affordable rent.

Charities say, however, that this is positive – but more action is needed to ease the housing crisis. The charity Empty Homes says that while there are about 730,000 unused properties in England and 930,000 across the UK, there are 1.7 million families on waiting lists for social housing in England and 2 million in the UK.

Campbell Robb, the chief executive of , said: "With someone losing their home every two minutes, our housing crisis has never been more urgent. As the most visible sign of housing waste, empty homes are an emotive issue. But while bringing them back into use is a positive first step, it only scratches the surface of the homes we need. The majority of homes are only empty for a short period of time between sales, so we need to focus on the long-term empty properties that blight neighbourhoods.

"One problem is that areas with a glut of empty houses aren't always the areas where homes are most desperately needed, or where jobs are available. Some towns have plenty of empty homes but high unemployment, whereas in the south-west, bringing empty homes back into use would meet just 1% of new demand for homes in the next five years. "There are often practical problems too: empty houses may be in severe disrepair or badly situated, or the owner might not be traceable. It would be impossible to completely eradicate empty homes – some are empty because their owner is in long-term care, or there are disagreements over legal ownership.

"It's fundamentally wrong that homes should stand empty while families are desperate for somewhere to live. But it's easy to be seduced by the idea that this alone can solve the housing crisis. We can't ignore the fact that we have to build more homes, as well as recycle them."

Howard Sinclair, chief executive of Real Lettings, the lettings arm of London housing charity Broadway, said that many people on low incomes and benefits could not afford to rent homes even when they were brought back into use because of recently introduced housing benefit caps. "The idea that by filling empty homes we can meet the gap in social housing is a simplistic one. It is part of the answer - but only part. Alongside enabling local authorities to bring empty homes into use, we need a coherent strategy about how people who need social housing can access it both in terms of making properties available and also them having the money to pay for it," he said.

"By the Department for Work and Pensions's own figures, already 48% of people receiving housing benefit have a rent shortfall because their net rent was more than the housing benefit applied for – and this proportion is set to rise significantly as benefit changes kick in."

The warning comes in advance of new statutory homelessness figures, due out on Thursday, which are expected to show a steep rise.

David Ireland, the chief executive of Empty Homes, said the government was setting a "rather timid target" of getting just 3,300 empty homes into use through the announced measures. But he said that local authorities could probably achieve much more: "Wakefield council, for example, has announced a new loans fund to help owners of empty properties that can't get bank loans. The fund is financed by rewards the council gets for getting empty homes back into use and aims to help owners of 3,000 empty homes. It's a good example of a council using one of the government's new measures and stretching the benefit."